Left is united, but past ghosts haunt

New Delhi: There are just 18 candidates contesting for central panel posts in the forthcoming JNU students’ union elections. Only three groups have nominated complete panels of candidates — ABVP, NSUI and Birsa-Ambedkar-Phule Students’ Association.

The

Left

isn’t taking any chances. In three of four central panel posts, the Left in its entirety is represented by a single candidate. The All India Students’ Association (AISA) and Students’ Federation of India (SFI) will make extremely strange bedfellows as “Left Unity,” while Kanhaiya Kumar’s All India Students’ Federation (AISF) sits the election out and Democratic Students’ Federation (DSF) has just one candidate, running for joint-secretary.

“Ours is the only Left panel this year,” says vice-president Shehla Rashid Shora of AISA. ABVP’s Saurabh Kumar Sharma, jointsecretary in the present JNUSU, sees this as the “Left ganging up because they feel their influence is shrinking on campus”.

But a perfect unity is still missing. An attempt to form an alliance by including DSF and AISF fell through. The first was left out due to differences over the handling of the recent rape case. “But we won’t fight the Left, we learnt our lesson last year,” says V Lenin Kumar of DSF.

Kanhaiya Kumar agrees: “All the Left groups contested separately and competed with each other. As a result, an ABVP candidate slipped through by a margin of 27 votes. We don’t want a repeat of that. We’ve chosen not to contest and will support Left Unity.”

No matter who wins, the new JNUSU will have to grapple with the fallout of the February 9 incident. Who stood where on that will matter. Here, even NSUI has a point to make as its presidential candidate, Sunny Dhiman reminds that he and NSUI “stood by Kanhaiya Kumar and by Umar Khalid’s right to speak”.

The Left-Unity is clearly claiming as its own the power and legacy of the Stand-With-JNU movement. Its presidential candidate, Mohit Kumar Pandey, catalogues the student movements across campuses and reminds that “it began with the persecution of Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle in IIT Madras”.

“You can’t question and the democratic spaces are being attacked. Why have a Shut-Down JNU campaign? Why against a public-funded university?” he asks. The new tag-line for this group’s campaign is “Fight Back JNU”.

But the recent case of rape on campus, allegedly by a senior AISA activist, has given its opponents another stick to bash the Left with. And ABVP’s Jahnawi Ojha – the only woman contesting for president – isn’t letting it go. “When did ‘Stand with JNU’ turn into ‘Stand with Rapist’?” she says.

Some groups, including NSUI, believe that AISA has not done enough on the rape issue. BAPSA’s Sonpimple Rahul Punaram dismisses both Left and Right as “casteist and Brahminical”, offering an insight into why it chose to go solo.

Members of other Left groups say they too had been approached. Deelip Kumar will contest for president in Students’ Front for Swaraj’s maiden bid for a central panel post.


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